September 25th

Welcome one and all. It is my pleasure to be your guide today around the Gallery of Vidogame Blogging and Criticism from this week. We have a bevy of word-pieces for you, so if you’ll just follow me through the gallery…

Meanwhile on your right you’ll see Juster’s partner in crime Jorge Albor at the Experience Points blog looking at the discussion coming out of Games for Change (G4C) and their “focus on “serious” and social impact games.” The discussion at present is around ‘What kind of change are we talking about here?‘

Even if you didn’t exactly enjoy yourself at the time, you’ll probably look back and consider it a fun experience. Not because you enjoyed playing it…but because you enjoyed the result.

On the feature wall to your left we are proud to present two new pieces from our very own David Carlton at the Malvasia Bianca blog. Continuing on from last week’s puzzle talks, he focuses on Catherine here in ‘Rearranging mental blocks‘, and addresses the game more holistically in the aptly titled ‘Catherine.’

If you will follow me into the next antechamber you can see two pieces of worthwhile news. To your left, Tracey Lien has a real piece of investigative journalism at Kotaku Australia, exploring the consequences of ‘What Happens To Developers When A Studio Closes‘, counterpointed nicely by the challenging political overtones of GamePolitics’ ‘How a 14 Year-Old Girl Changed NHL 12.’ I believe this title speaks for itself.

Keep up, everyone, please keep up. We are now entering the Hall of Theory.

Personally, I find it all incredibly infuriating when I watch television and see creationism and evolution debated as equal ‘theories’, or when the secret agendas of a climate scientist’s peer-reviewed findings are questioned by an oil company, but that is not an area I’m an expert in or tend to write on. What I find interesting, however, is how this general attitude to the sciences permeates and is reflected in our cultural texts. In particularly, two videogames I’ve played and loved in recent months I think could be seen as emerging from this culture that has become obsessed with discrediting and deriding the sciences.

Now if you will follow me into The Room of Games, where we have a number of interesting pieces on individual games.

Here before us is another piece that was rescued from the archives by a diligent graduate student doing research for us. This week we are proud to present the work of Tom Bissell and his thoughts on Dead Island for Grantland. We are very fortunate indeed this piece has been spared the indignity of languishing undisplayed in the basement.

Late in Gears of War 3, someone will say, “Bloody hell, they found the UIR! It’s a Gorasni ship!” The line is delivered as if it’s something that matters, but Gears of War 3 hasn’t told me what a UIR is or who the Gorasni are. The line might as well have been “Bloody hell, they found the Boop-i-dee-bop! It’s a Whamble-di-dee ship!” It’s an example of how Gears 3 cares about itself far too much to be arsed to care about me.

Now please feel free to browse around, I hope you have enjoyed the tour and we thank you for stopping by the Gallery of Vidogame Blogging and Criticism. Please feel free to direct your comments, suggests and recommendations to the Board of Trustees via twitter or email.